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Blog Posts on Arts and Culture

Happy Holidays from your afternoon host guy on WXXI! It's been a busy Fall, but now that the Winter is officially upon us, I thought I'd offer a little Christmas present to you. The Eastman Wind Ensemble just toured to Michigan and Chicago, playing at the prestigious Midwest Clinic.

The video game Rock Band lets you sing into a microphone that's plugged into your game console. If you sing the right pitches and the right rhythms, you earn points. A bored flutist recently made this stunning discovery:

While reading through my emails, I found one slugged "Touching story RE: Andre Watts." It both broke my heart and reaffirmed all that we can do with music, and with TV. I was once told that Andre Watts is a great and generous man. This confirms that beyond all doubt. Enjoy.

Fresh from Athens and just a few days after singing Mahler's Das Lied Von Der Erde at Carnegie Hall, tenor Gregory Kunde (who lives in Rochester) will pick up a baton on November 1 at St. Anne Church and conduct Brahms' German Requiem. If you've never seen him sing, here's his performance of Bellini's "A te o cara" from I Puritani.

Translation: To you, oh dear one, love at times lead me furtively and in tears; now it guides me to your side in joy and exultation. At the radiance of such a beautiful hour if I remember my torment, it redoubles my happiness, and I cherish my heart’s beating.

Over the first weekend of October, nearly 8,000 people experienced Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" performed by the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and Rochester Oratorio Society in the newly-renovated Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre. One patron blogged about what she saw and heard, and she inspired me to share this clip with you.